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Many of us have more free time at home than we know what to do with. Sure, you can spend those hours binge watching the latest shows but it’s likely you’re starting to want to do something more productive. This is the ideal time to learn a new skill. That’s where a no-commitment, free month trial of Pluralsight can help, giving you plenty of great classes with absolutely no risk to you.

Whether you’re looking to learn a new skill in your free time or you’re in the unfortunate position of needing to change career paths after being let go or furloughed, Pluralsight has a range of great tech-oriented classes to help you achieve your full potential, as well as learn something new. It’s all aimed at making these tough times a little better.

Pluralsight is focused on providing you with the valuable tech skills that everyone needs to get ahead in employment right now, and it’s entirely free throughout April. There’s no need to enter any payment details. Simply sign up with your name and email address, and you gain access to more than 7,000 expert-led video courses.

With so many courses to choose from, we thought we’d help out by highlighting some of the best Pluralsight courses to get you started.

We’ve all used Microsoft Office 2019 at some point, even if it’s simply typing up a document in Word. How many of us truly understand all its features, though? The Using Microsoft Office 2019 course teaches you everything you need to know about Word, Excel, Access, Outlook, Publisher, and PowerPoint, from the very basics right up to advanced techniques. By the time you’re back in the office, you’ll be an expert and able to wow your boss thanks to these video classes.

Photoshop is an immensely powerful photo editing and manipulation tool. It’s easy to be confused by it so this course helps teach you the absolute basics like the importance of layers, before moving on to teach you how to retouch images, use the smart objects feature, and master channels and masks.

Much like Photoshop, Premiere Pro CC can be as powerful as you need it to be. You can use it for simple video editing but it’s also used for big Hollywood blockbusters, too. It’s all to do with knowing how to use its features to create a quick video or a massive 2-hour movie. Master it through this course and opportunities within creative fields may open up to you. It teaches you everything from camera edits to applying title sequences and effects.

Web design and development is a skillset that never goes out of fashion. Learn HTML via this HTML5 course and you can master writing static pages online and manipulating dynamically generated HTML too. You’ll need a passing familiarity with JavaScript and CSS to get the most from it but if you’re a little out of date with your HTML coding knowledge, this is just the refresher course for you. It teaches you solid foundations that are perfect as a springboard to your future career.

At its simplest, CSS is what makes websites look pretty. It’s all about manipulating fonts, colors, shapes, and animations online, with CSS being immensely powerful once you know how. This course requires some basic knowledge of HTML then moves quickly onto showing you how to position elements with CSS and teaches you to write with LESS and SASS. It’s ideal for a career shift.

Python is an object-oriented programming language that works alongside everything from HTML to programming a Raspberry Pi. Its uses are vast and it’s great for broadening your knowledge base and skillset, since it can be implemented in so many different scenarios. It can also be quickly applied once you know how. This course teaches you the basics like variables, types, and conditionals, before moving onto best practices and how best to implement advanced frameworks.

JavaScript is another key component to advanced web development, and a useful one to master. This course teaches the basics like syntax, variables, arrays and so forth, before moving onto more complex subjects like promises, asynchronous programming, proxies and reflection. It requires knowledge of HTML and CSS first, so it’s good for those who want to fine-tune their existing skills.

If you need a more general course on web development, Pluralsight has that covered as well. Its web development courses include looks at ASP.NET, Django, front end web development, as well as HTML, Javascript, CSS, and Python. The courses follow you right from the very beginning to launching your first website, giving you a great sense of satisfaction as well as some very useful and transferable skills.

Apps are everywhere so why not capitalize on this by learning how to develop your own applications? There are many courses available with lessons devoted to mastering Swift, Kotlin, and JavaScript within a mobile development context. Whether you’re developing iOS, Android, or Windows-based apps, the courses teach you how best to devise clean code that works well and effectively for your clients.

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